Communication tools and methods have evolved significantly over the past two decades, and have become a part of our everyday life. Individuals at corporate offices, business companies/enterprises, and various organizations rely heavily on these communication tools. There are various modes of communication, such as instant messaging, electronic mails (e-mails), telephones, and the like, through which people can interact with each other. The extensive growth and spread of the Internet over the past years has popularized some of these modes, especially e-mail. Sending and receiving e-mails has become one of the most relied upon ways of communication in corporate offices, business enterprises and organizations. Various types of e-mail applications used by the people today are Microsoft Outlook®, Gmail™, Yahoo!®, Hotmail®, Lotus Notes®, Thunder Bird®, and the like.
In general, e-mail provides a quick and easy way to stay in touch with family, friends, and business contacts, including co-workers, employers, and clients. It plays an important role in personal as well as professional communication. For instance, e-mail is used for communicating with friends, initiating a deal, interacting with clients, applying for a new job, and for almost all sorts of communication performed online. It is the most widely used mode of communication. In fact, most services on the Internet, even social networking sites such as Orkut®, Face Book™, and the like, ask for the user's e-mail address before allowing him/her to use their services. The importance of e-mail is only going to increase over time.
Each day, hundreds of e-mails are exchanged among friends, business contacts and business acquaintances. This results in a long list of e-mails in the user's mailbox. It becomes very difficult for the user to keep track of all the e-mails and to respond to them immediately. Therefore, one of the most challenging tasks in e-mail communication is to search and rank e-mails in the mailbox to facilitate retrieval of relevant e-mails when required.
Currently, the most prevalent method for searching e-mails in a typical mailbox is to look for an exact match of the search term and to show the matching results chronologically by date in a descending order. For example, when the user enters the keyword “patent”, a search function searches the user's mailbox for all the e-mails that have the keyword. Once all the e-mails relating to the keyword are searched, a list of e-mails containing the keyword is displayed to the user in a chronological order. One of the shortcomings of this method is that since no specific weightage is given to any e-mail, the system performs a “blind search” on all the e-mails and displays matching search terms in a chronological order of date which results in many irrelevant results being shown at the top of the results. This method of searching for e-mails does not ensure that the most relevant e-mails to the given search term are shown at the top of the results.
Also, the existing methods and systems are unable to derive context of the search term input by the user. For example, if a person enters 10*4 in the Google search box, the Google algorithm is intelligent enough to understand the context that the user is in all probability searching for the product of the numbers 10 and 4, instead of treating the numbers as general search terms. The existing methods and systems of e-mail search fail to differentiate between keywords depending on the requirement. For example, keywords entered by the user that correspond to, say, a person or a domain name need to be treated differently for the search. Accordingly, there is a need to understand the context of the user's entry, i.e., whether the user is searching for e-mails from a particular person, e.g., a person named “Sam Spade,” or a domain such as “uspto.gov” or “ebay.com.” Existing methods are capable of searching by person but only if it is specified by the user that he/she is looking for a person. The existing systems are not intelligent enough to understand the context such as that understood by the Google search. As mentioned earlier, Google is able to understand that the user most probably wants to make an arithmetic calculation and not search for the words 10*4.
In light of the foregoing discussion, there is a need for a method and system to search for e-mails in a mailbox in a manner so as to identify results that are relevant to the user. Further, the method and system should rank the searched results based on their relevance. In addition to the above, the method and system should differentiate between the keywords depending on the search requirements or contexts.